Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Trademark Galleries on Scraperwiki, via OpenCorporates

What trademarks – familiar to us all – are registered with which companies? And how often are trademarked brands in larger outlets actually ‘exclusive offerings’, aka “own range” products in weak disguise? In Looking up Images Trademarked By Companies Using OpenCorporates and Google Refine, I demonstrated a recipe for using OpenCorporates.com as a way in to previewing at least some of the trademarks registered to a specified (UK registered?) company. Here’s a recipe using Scraperwiki to do a similar thing…

But first, do you recognise any of these trademarks…

… as belonging to Tesco?

The recipe goes something like this… For a given company name keyword, look up that company on OpenCorporates and get a list of company identifiers back:

For each of those companies, we’ll need to look up the company details on OpenCorporates. To benefit from an increased API limit, it makes sense to use an OpenCorporates API key to do this. The idea of API keys is typically that they are assigned to specific users, which is to say, you’re supposed to keep them secret. But how do we do this on Scraperwiki, an otherwise open environment? Here’s trick I found on the Scraperwiki blog that allows you to keep things like API keys secret… Make the scraper a protected one, and then hide the keys in scraper description on the scraper’s homepage using the following convention:

__BEGIN_QSENVVARS__
OC_KEY = XXXXXX
__END_QSENVVARS__

where XXXXXX is your API key value (don’t use quotes around the value – use the actual value).

To get the trademark data, we need to pull the company data for each company ID of interest, look to see if there are any trademark records associated with it in the OpenCorporates database, and if so, pull those records:

That’s not to say I don’t see value in this micro-attempts at making sense of the world around us such as this one, though. Trademark brands are pervasive, but it’s often not obvious who actually owns them, and may even mask a lack of competition with an appearance of competition (for example, when a company owns two different trademark brands that a consumer thinks of as being competitive offerings by different providers, when in fact they are both owned by the same company; or when you mistake a company offshoot for a third party franchise, as I realised when I saw that BP owned the Wild Bean Cafe trademark…)

@chris :-) I didn’t realise you were going after all the WIPO trademark data? I thought about trying to do something to preview daily trademark updates, but I couldn’t think how to sensibly display them?

One thing I’ve started to come round to is how Linked Data approaches may start to come into their own when it comes to searching. For example, it would be handy to be able to write a query that could look for trademarks registered by a given company name or companies who share an address or director with the named company.

What would be a really neat hack would be something like Google image search that could identify a trademarked image, tell you its registration details and then map out other trademarks in the same area/sector registered by other companies in the same corporate group…